Word: leche
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Strikes. Economic debacle. Invasion jitters. It might seem at a quick glance that nothing much had changed in Poland since those turbulent days last summer, when an obscure electrician named Lech Walesa clambered over the gates of Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to take control of a burgeoning national strike. In reality almost everything is different. The 1980 strikes shook the Communist world to its roots, engendering the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, Solidarity, and launching a far-reaching process of reform and re-examination called odnowa (renewal...
...week completed the election of delegates to an extraordinary party congress. Its purpose: to elect party leaders and act on a series of proposed structural reforms that are expected to make the Polish Communist Party by far the most liberal in the Soviet bloc. Even prominent nonparty members like Lech Walesa, leader of the independent Solidarity union federation, were hoping that the congress would succeed and thus help stabilize the country...
...renewal," the committee's final resolution promised a "re-evaluation of journalistic cadres" -signaling a probable purge of journalists -and called for the forces of public order to crack down on open dissent. The resolution also labeled political strikes "inadmissible." On this last point, even Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa was moved to agree, telling workers at a Warsaw auto plant that "we [Solidarity] do not exist to change the government or to engage in political activities." It remains to be seen how aggressively the party's pledges will be carried out. The Poles have found ways to circumvent...
...climactic events of last year, Wyszynski supported the cause of striking Polish workers, although his early public calls for moderation led some militants to suspect him of siding with the government. He ultimately played a crucial mediating role, meeting with both Solidarity Union Leader Lech Walesa and Communist Party Boss Stanislaw Kania, and thereby helped stave off a possibly catastrophic confrontation. Said Walesa, who continually looked to Wyszynski for inspiration and advice: "The Cardinal's teachings brought us to the point we all dreamed about." Last week millions of Poles could say the same thing about...
...stories of the past year. Nowhere have the heroes in that battle been more appealing, more heroic, than in Poland, where the workers of a putative workers' state demonstrated the power of protest with persuasive eloquence. We joined all Americans in glorying in the slow but steady progress of Lech Walesa and his comrades; likewise we have scorned the lumbering belligerence of the Soviet Union in its refusal to grant the reforms that Poland's people demand...